Wednesday, January 25, 2012

A mob turncoat whose testimony helped doom the New Jersey crime family that inspired “The Sopranos” has died while hiding in witness protection, The Post has learned.
Stool pigeon Anthony Capo, 52, dropped dead Monday after suffering a heart attack.
“There were more people celebrating this on Staten Island than the Giants’ win,” said one source.
The death of Capo, who once stabbed a mob rival in the eye with a fork at a Staten Island club, was confirmed by his onetime lawyer, Joel Stein.
Capo, a former soldier in the DeCavalcante clan, spilled the beans on the organization at a 2003 murder trial in Manhattan federal court, where he described how he whacked a mobster for being gay.

Anthony Capo

“Nobody’s going to respect us if we have a gay homosexual boss sitting down discussing La Cosa Nostra business,” Capo said, explaining why John “Johnny Boy” D’Amato, the former acting boss of the Essex County-based crime syndicate, had to die.
Capo blasted D’Amato four times in the face in January 1992 as he sat in a car outside his girlfriend’s Mill Basin home in Brooklyn.
Capo’s canary performance helped send DeCavalcante family consigliere Stefano Vitabile and capos Philip Abramo and Giuseppe “Pino” Schifilliti to the slammer on a slew of racketeering charges.
The D’Amato hit echoed a storyline in HBO’s “The Sopranos,” in which a mobster is whacked after he’s seen at a gay bar.
During the trial, Capo also explained how the DeCavalcante family snuffed out Staten Island real-estate developer and former newspaper editor Fred Weiss to impress New York-based Mafia families.
Capo told jurors how, in September 1989, he drove the two assassins who blasted Weiss seven times as he entered his car in front of his home.
Weiss was under investigation for a Mafia-related trash-dumping operation and Capo said Weiss was marked for death because the mob feared he would turn government witness.
Capo also said that about three months after the hit, he was hanging out in a Manhattan club when then-Gambino boss John Gotti winked at him.
“I guess to let me know we did a good job,” said Capo.
The goodwill apparently didn’t last long — in 1994 Gotti’s then-driver, Joseph “JoJo” Corozzo, allegedly tried to kill Capo.
Corozzo is now cooling his heels in a federal lockup.